Is it ethical to have children in a “doomed world”? Christine Emba dives into this heavily debated topic, exploring both the practical and emotional sides of parenting in 2025. She challenges the doom-and-gloom narrative, reminding us that despite today’s obstacles, quality of life is better than ever.
Timestamps:
0:00: Having children in a “doomed world”
0:51: The risks of not having children
2:29: Quality of life
3:51: Natality
Transcript:
Having children in a “doomed world”
More and more people are wondering whether it's ethical to have children. It's a consideration that seems somewhat new to our time. After all, in past years, having children was the default. Not having children was looked down upon. But in our current social climate and our physical climate too, which does feel like it's deteriorating, there's a sense of fatalism, a fear that bringing someone new into the world might be a bad thing. I don't actually feel that this is the case. When it comes to climate change in particular, I don't know that we're making the world better by having less of a stake in it.
The risks of not having children
So what are the risks of not having enough children? There are kind of the straightforward economic ones. Children end up being the caretakers of the adults that came before them. If you want someone to pay into Social Security, say, so that you can retire when you're older, there does have to be someone existing to do that, a child who was born after you. You're seeing the effects of this in countries like Japan and South Korea, where birth rates have fallen dramatically and now the elderly outnumber the young. It's not a pretty scene. But I also don't necessarily think that we can or should have children just to be ensured of our Social Security payments, or under the assumption that they will be forced to take care of us while they're old.
There's also something to having children as a way to invest in society in a less monetary way. Often, those with children, and children themselves, have kind of a stake in the future. You are, in fact, tied to society by virtue of your love and your family. Having children can make us more invested in the world, not less. Often, when people ask, "Should I have children in the face of climate change or a bad presidency?," they're not really asking about children, so much as whether there's hope for the future, whether they should be completely fatalistic about the climate or politics or gun violence in schools, whether, in fact, the human condition is in inexorable decline.
Quality of life
But the thing is, life actually is getting better, and it has gotten better. Before 1800, the average lifespan was around 30 years. Now, it's above 70. In our current moment, the voices of people who hadn't been heard in the past are now being heard. Change is happening rapidly. Technological advances that we actually can't even think of have the power to shape our future. The Marxist thinker, Fredric Jameson, is credited with saying, "It's easier to believe in the end of the world than the end of capitalism." And I think there's something similar at play in our conception of the future.
It's very easy to imagine how things can go wrong. It's harder for us to imagine how things might go right, what it would look like if things improve. And in fact, there's lots of evidence that things are improving, and may well continue to do so. It is certainly easy to feel that the climate is falling apart, that our political situation is bad or stagnant, maybe even getting worse. But this is also a failure of our own imagination, political and otherwise. It is, in fact, possible that change can happen, that our children won't live in the present that we live in, and that actually might be a reason for hope.
Natality
The philosopher, Hannah Arendt, uses the term natality to describe the possibility inherent in the prospect of birth. There's the potential for change. There is a potential for the world to be better than it is in our time. A new person, a new thing, threatens to upend the current order of things and perhaps even improve it. Having a child can, in some sense, be a statement of faith, and also a mode of change in the future.
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